Today I read something on X which got my brain turning – unusual since that is not a source of much inspiration in my experience so far. Someone quoted Maya Angelou

Now quite a long time ago I wrote a post – Making Mistakes – which was actually very much about the same idea. However, on reflection, perhaps the use of the word mistakes was not quite the right thing to say since I was talking about a lack of knowledge (of some sort) rather than the more common way mistake is taken to mean which is to have reached an answer that is not supported by the ‘facts’ that you know.

Elsewhere I better characterised it in the phrase that “No one ever makes a wrong decision”. Better because it sort of captures the Maya Angelou idea that learning is something that is forever incomplete and you cannot be wrong if your decision is based on the ‘best’ information that you have when you make that decision.

One thing that I need to talk a little about is whether things that you ‘should’ know, or things you have forgotten or things that you wilfully ignore or mischaracterise can actually contribute to a truly wrong decision. The use of misinformation most certainly does not make a decision wrong – unless there are reasons why the use of it should have been clearly avoided.

Going back to the original quote threw my thoughts in a slightly different direction. This was something that was brought up in various guises in the responses on X to the quote. I know that it is easy to look back at things in the past – the recent past or many years ago – and wonder why a particular decision did not turn out how you expected it to. The thing here is that there is little to be gained by getting worried or frustrated (or whatever) and berating yourself for “not knowing” – failure is a necessary part of learning in many ways – what would be wrong is not doing the learning.

(and yes at this point I am seeing a very bizarre circular argument developing where it is not wrong to have made the decision but it is wrong to not take onboard the lessons – or is that equally not wrong because you don’t understand the lessons that you need to learn )

From my previous writing you would know that I – with my systems hat on – think that it is impossible to predict every consequence of even the most simple decisions. Often the “unexpected” happens a long time after the original decision – often affecting those who have nothing to do with the original decision – perhaps in a different location. It is impossible to know – at the time – exactly what will occur and perhaps more relevantly to know what other decisions by other people at different times will bump up against the consequences of your decisions to result in some emergent consequence which not only wasn’t expected but could not be expected.

Trawling through my writing here would find many similar mentions of this sort of thing – the way in which things interact, the difficulty to know future effect and so on. Enough here that there are a few wise words on the subject which agree with my own viewpoint (OK – so Confirmation Bias is a strong attractor that we must be aware of )

I initially had finished this post at this point, but further reflection and writing the next post in this blog has caused me to think of some other relevant remarks.

I got to think about how, when we are relatively young, we make huge life defining decisions and, looking back, we were really very unprepared to make the right choices – so to some extent and in many cases to a very great extent our choices are blind and anything beneficial which comes from them are to put it bluntly just good luck.

When you choose which subjects to study at school; when you choose which university to go to and then which course you follow; when you apply for a job; who will be your friends; these are all decision points that we face with a large amount of ignorance. I think for instance of choosing that I was going to study Accountancy – I chose that mainly because I was good at maths and it seemed as though accountants earned good money . I then chose the university – I say chose, having applied for five only Strathclyde offered me a guaranteed place without any further results in my 6th year at school.

First year at uni we had do do five courses – Accountancy, of course, Business Law and Business Economics were both then mandated and I added Operational Research and Industrial Relations even though I had virtually no idea what Operational Research was . Four years later, Accountancy was gone and I had an honours degree in Operational Research which to a large extent shaped my entire career – although even then it wasn’t until quite a long time after that when its influence was felt when I joined in modelling group (more than ten years later).

Now this is just one of the strands of life defining decisions that I could go through. The next post is about the Either/Or situations – and explains that often its more complicated (like in the which subjects should I study – there was a wide choice, it could be viewed as either study it or not for each subject but there were other constraints) and more than just a binary choice.

Thing is – when you are young and making all these choices you are ill-equipped to decide what is the best option and whatever you choose is only slightly more likely to result in a beneficial outcome than just using pot luck. Yes – we all felt well informed! We could look back on all the decisions (although many we would not remember making) and wonder “what if” but that, as I have written about elsewhere, is a foolish and pointless exercise in reality. The only point of a “what if” investigation is probably to highlight any opportunities that we forfeited by making the choices that we did.

I have, in other posts examined the decision making process, this post is more to point out just how the lack of knowledge at any point in time really does influence the decisions – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse but always by chance.

I discovered that someone else had also written about this topic – along the same lines, but with different words reflecting their own worldview – worth reading for comparison and confirmation.

Currently the so-called “most powerful position” in the world is held by a person who used to be a reality TV show host; who was, presumably, well used to dictating the way in which the “reality” was crafted and had a big say in what was seen and what was not seen; who almost certainly used his role to try to ensure that his “image” was always portrayed in the “best light”.  He has brought all those lessons learned (but not well learned) to his current post.

Unfortunately for him there have been a number of times when “real life” has intervened – in as much as he has been unable to ensure that everything goes the way he wants – none more so than over the last days when the entire country has been absolutely shaken up by events in Minneapolis last Monday.  He tries hard at all times to create his own reality, only to be thwarted by the fact that he does not have control over everything that impinges on that world he is trying to create.

I have, although perhaps not in so many words, said before that we all do this – we have what I call “mental models” of how the world around us works and those are constantly being changed as we learn new things and as we encounter things that don’t resonate well with our current view of the world.  Most of the time we are reasonably comfortable with such adjustments as they are usually minor – but now and again something comes along which requires a significant rethink and those times can be uncomfortable.

Obviously I am writing this from the viewpoint of a spectator of events in the USA, but it seems to me that for many these last few days have been one of those times – and it has certainly been uncomfortable.  The central theme is, of course, the biased treatment of some by the upholders of law and order.

Now, I know far too many people who are or were members of the police to fall into the trap of lumping all policemen together as “the enemy” and it is only a few weeks ago that I wrote about the scourge of “usandthemism“.  I do believe that most of those trying to uphold law and order are doing their best and would be quick to condemn what we saw happen in Minneapolis.

That is important – “what we saw” – there are many stories of incidents that were not seen – and then it becomes much more difficult to condemn because it is human nature to have doubts about “hearsay” and, inevitably, we come back to the very centre of usandthemism and you get the situation where each “us” group bands together and closes ranks.

It has often been the case that the “Blue Wall” has prevented justice from occurring. With a video it becomes much more difficult to fabricate a different reality.

We saw this in Buffalo – he “tripped and fell” – until the video surfaced showing that he was clearly pushed. Rightly in this case the two perpetrators were quickly suspended – only for 57 others to “support” them by resigning from the emergency response team. Now, of course, we gain another problem – it is far from easy for any of those 57 to “break ranks” and admit to themselves that this action was wrong.

Clearly the culture encourages such strong arm tactics – I have heard it so often from people this week who have been on the “wrong end” of the discrimination – and the most telling are those when the “mood” changes in an instant due to some small – but significant event – like seeing a camera. BUT – seeing a camera did not save George Floyd – and I am sure that there are plenty who would not be at all ruffled by the idea that someone might “catch” them – heard a report tonight of a policeman with 79 complaints of excessive force – golly – and he had only been in the police for three and a half years!!

Firstly – that is an amazing rate of racking up offences – secondly – why did no one do anything about it given the frequency of occurrence.

The current focus is on the USA and the racist actions of (some of) its police force members. However, the injustices are not confined to that country, nor to clashes between those empowered to enforce the law and the “general public”.

I wrote this a while ago now and it is as yet unfinished however events have moved forward and I feel that I need to start afresh – so I am publishing it “as is”.

This post falls into a large number of the categories that I have outlined for this blog – not a surprise since there are a lot of different aspects of the problem that need to be challenged, addressed and considered.  The root of it all is that, for the most part, the facebook feed is full of data – and I choose that word carefully as being at the bottom of the pyramid.  There have been countless instances of “fake news” and the worrying reports of ‘interference’ in elections by foreign actors are – I think – almost certainly true.  The only conclusion is that we cannot rely on the data carrying any information.

Going higher in the pyramid – it requires some careful thought to reach knowledge and – some would argue – no wisdom will ever come out of facebook.  For what it is worth I would greatly dispute that last point – but each and every person has to work quite hard to attain such a state.

In many ways the problem is no different to the pre-www days -what  has changed is that the spread of everything is so much quicker and the coverage is so much wider.  Once upon a time, if I said something to a friend it was very likely that only a few people would ever know.  Nowadays, something said to a friend can spread like wildfire around the world – even before you realise that, perhaps, it wasn’t the wisest thing to say.

The limit on characters in a tweet is also a big driver on the “lack of information” – whilst forcing brevity on some people is – to be honest – a welcome relief (said many of my readers!) – it is often difficult – if not completely impossible to provide sufficient context in so few characters.

Equally there are plenty of people around who have an attention span that probably would be tested by twitter  they need to be catered for as much as those who delve most deeply.  I must dig out the slide – in one of our presentations regarding systems engineering we talked about generalists and specialists.  Within the context of what we were discussing then we simply divided the community into those who knew a lot about a very specific subject and those who had a more superficial view of a much wider range of subjects.

The reality is that each person is a bit of a mix – and also within the generalist and specialist groupings there are those who have a greater understanding than others.  Then there are some who do not even seem to have grasped the basics of anything important – like those in America who were protesting lockdown (arguably a reasonable thing to protest about) with banners like “I need a haircut”, “massages are essential” and “Give me Liberty or Give me Covid-19” (missing the point that it would more likely be “and” rather than “or”.

For most of us though there are things we know about a lot and things that we do not have a clue about and lots of things in between.  Where facebook and the like fall down rather is changing that in any meaningful way.  It is predicated on a “you hear more of what you want to hear” sort of model where your own world view is continually reinforced by what you read.  A bit like Trump supporters who only watch Fox News or OANN I guess.  Unless you open yourself up to ‘new’ knowledge you will forever be stuck with what you think you know.

So – how to help – perhaps by posting some ‘different’ things on facebook – most won’t read them or watch them – but maybe one or two will – and that one or two may also start spreading good stuff.

Don’t get me wrong – I am certainly not saying there is no “good stuff” on facebook already – I belong to a number of groups whom I value – its just that in the daily grind that sort of thing is largely drowned out by stuff that is (probably) less important.

When I contributed a lot to LinkedIn I often saw people say to others “that doesn’t belong here – take it to facebook” when there was something that was ‘beneath’ the standards (such as they are) of LinkedIn.  Perhaps a few links here and there would enable a few facebook users to say “give me some more of that” and click the like button.

No one can doubt that we are bombarded with “information” at a rate which is not only unprecedented but which is also beyond our capacity to comprehend and assimilate. The result is that we are faced with having to choose (sometimes unthinkingly) which pieces of information are going to ‘stick’ and which are going to fly ‘in one ear and out the other’!!

How much of what we receive is “true” is anyone’s guess – what is for sure is that it is certainly not 100%. There is a level of “fake” information whether deliberately propagated as some sort of propaganda; accidentally spread due to some misunderstanding; unknowingly distributed because of some level of ignorance; or created as a “hoax” – either for sinister purposes or for comedic purposes.

The best comedy often fails to strike home with everyone – many “don’t get it” – political satire has been around for as long as politics and there are always those who “don’t get it” (often those with opposing points of view) or simply don’t find it funny. All comedy works on a thin line between what is acceptable and what is not (and I have spoken before about how that line moves…..) and a measure of acceptability is unique to an individual.

I won’t rehash the arguments about the “grey area” here – simply restate that it exists.

Spoof news sites abound – often telling (what I think are) extremely amusing tales – that could be true – often we might even wish they were true. Every year on April 1st the entire media competes for the best “April Fool” joke – a story so astonishing that it couldn’t possibly be made up – or could it? On that day we are all looking out for exactly that sort of thing. For the other days of the year we tend to completely suspect such judgement and accept whatever the media is spouting as the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – even when we are aware that there is such a thing as media bias; that rich men can control media outputs for their own ends; and that often it is impossible to tell whether something is true anyway.

Witness the “historic sex abuse” investigations – it has now emerged that on some occasions (at least) the accusations made against certain individuals were false ones (or were they – perhaps they were simply ones that could not be proved!) – the “news” so widely trumpetted in the media has proven to be somewhat less than 100% true.

Listening to the local news the other evening the top three stories ALL involved someone who was described as “a fantasist” – no doubt believing what they were saying was true – but seemingly it was only true in some separate far away universe. They each had – one way or another – woven a tissue of untruths that masked reality – for them and for other people.

It is my assumption that these “fantasists” were creating “fake news” because that is there own peculiar talent – unfortunately they each had created anguish, misery and pain for others by doing so.

These were people who are “manipulators” – something that is clearly seen as “a bad thing” in our society and culture. Once again though we have a “grey area” – at what point does the “manipulation” become wrong. We are manipulated in countless ways each and every day – most of these are benign and ensure that we make good choices – others are more insidious. Advertising of tobacco products is now almost entirely absent, but its not so long ago that it was a big revenue earner for advertisers.

The spoof news sites are, I guess, for the most part leaning towards the benign – but it is not many steps from there to manipulative propaganda – I guess of the sort that has caused the outcry following the election. The problem is – just as many people are taken in by the April Fool japes – so we are all often guilty of excessive gullibility!! We will each have small areas of expertise where it would be hard to fool us – but for the most part, we must judge the source of the news and rate the likelihood of it being ‘reasonable’.

Reputation is something that all information sources must work hard to maintain. Often the reputation is greater than the reality – certainly some question the “independence” and “even-handedness” of BBC reports – when at times in the past they were the “gold standard” against which others were judged.

An article the other day pointed out that one of the big problems of our new wired world with instant access to countless information sources is that – rather paradoxically – we each become ever more parochial as we are forced to choose what to spend our limited attention on – and we tend to choose what is “familiar” and doesn’t challenge our boundaries. So we get more and more reinforcement for our own view – ignoring the diversity that is available.

We select our news feed (or in the case of sites like Facebook – an algorithm chooses what it thinks we would be interested in) based on prior experience. As that continues to spiral inwards there are fewer opportunities to experience what its like on “the other side of the street”. Not only does that mean we do not agree with other’s points of view it also reduces the chances that we can possibly understand why they hold such different views – we have not been exposed to the arguments – simply a never ending stream of confirmation bias – a cognitive failure that everyone exhibits.

Its easy to ask why people don’t spot the fact that many of these fake stories are “jokes” – but that misses the point that the damaging fake news is deliberately put out there to pander to the confirmation bias that I just talked about. Propagandists know this – they prey on it. Those being taken in by the propaganda do so because it fits with their picture of the world.

The idea of mental models and a personal “worldview” goes right back to the very early posts in this blog. Our knowledge and experiences build up into a big picture of what “reality” is for each of us. It is, necessarily, flawed because that knowledge and experience cannot possibly be complete – the dangers arise when we stop realising that it is flawed!!

So – did “Fake News” influence the US election? Probably yes – but no more than it influences every other aspect of our lives if we let it. We can only guard against that danger by being aware of the implications of “news” coming from a single source and recognising that every source will have its own built in biases which will flavour the way in which it reports each and every event.

Without Doubt – without Uncertainty – there is no reason to learn – no reason to improve – no reason to seek knowledge. Absolute absence of doubt means that you “know it all” – only the absence of that certainty will trigger a search for a better understanding.

Fortunately, most people have doubts. Unfortunately, doubt is often treated as a negative characteristic. This leads to Doubt getting a bit of a bad press. So – most people are harbouring doubts and thinking that is a bad thing. Now it is certainly true that some doubts are unhelpful – but possibly less so than some “certainties”. There is – I would suggest – very little about which we can really be 100% certain – we can get close – but ONLY about what we have experienced – not about what we will (or might) experience.

When we start looking at the past we come up against the difficulty of separating reality from fantasy – as I have written about before. The further in the past something is, the less we can be certain about it. I can be reasonably certain that once I write this I will publish it in my blog – but even there a small doubt can creep in – it is certainly not 100% certain!!!

So – Doubt as a necessary condition for self development – seems like the start of a new series of articles on here (but I can’t be sure…)

It has been triggered by a discussion on LinkedIn about the “nature” of emergence – specifically the question asked was “What is your perspective on Emergence?” – and as you might expect a lively discussion has emerged – and yes, that was a very deliberate illustration of the self referential nature of the question.

There is much that could be written around that subject, but for this post I intend to concentrate not on the question itself, but on the nature of the answers.

It quickly became clear that the question triggered a wide range of mental models of what is meant by the term emergence. What was also clear was that – for some contributors – this was a good opportunity to hop on their personal hobby horse and espouse a very particular viewpoint. Perhaps I was guilty of that as well…

The result of this was, perhaps, a slightly disjointed discussion – helped by the facilitator keeping things on track and summarising what had been said so that everyone had the same view of that. It is clear – to me at least – that there is an element of impossibility attached to any attempt to “define” terms such as “system”, “emergence” or (especially) “systems thinking”. This makes it very difficult territory for some.

I am quite content to allow everything to be quite loose – whilst at the same time avoiding the “Humpty Dumpty” effect of :
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’.
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Unfortunately, there are some words (and both emergence and systems are in this category) where there are already so many shades of meaning that it is difficult not to sympathise with Alice. As a result of that – the fact that everyone has a differently nuanced understanding – I think that you have to be very understanding in any discussion. It is too easy to jump on a statement that grates with your own ideas – if those ideas are too fixed.

Given that EVERY communication involves a number of steps (and this is nothing new – I am merely outlining other’s ideas here) including the transmitter “imagining” something, then transforming that imagination into words, then saying the words (more – or less – successfully) which are heard by the receiver (or seen if it is written text…) who transforms those words into an image which is then analysed in some way (or perhaps is simply “understood” without any analysis) is a process littered with barriers to understanding.

These steps are predicated – in the first instance – on there being a common language between transmitter and recipient. If not, then more steps are required to perform the translation. All of this adds up to a situation that is no unlike the game “chinese whispers”. The chances that the model in the mind of the recipient matches that which started the journey in the mind of the transmitter is minimal – even if there is a concerted effort to minimise error.

Under ‘normal’ circumstances all of this is complicated further by the fact that the actual act of transmission is subject to information loss – can be for many reasons but the least obvious one to spot is simply that the receiver is not “trying” hard enough to get the right message. How often have you been involved in an argument where the parties are talking at cross purposes – talking past each other – hearing what they ‘expect’ to hear and responding with no regard to what was really said.

Awareness of all of this is of prime importance – we all KNOW that at times it is difficult to make yourself understood – we tend to (conveniently?) forget about that when we accept something we have written or said and “assume” that it will be correctly interpreted by the listener – we forget that the listener brings a whole lot of baggage with them to the exchange.

It can be that we have used words that are either unfamiliar, or used in a ‘different’ way – it could be that the listener is in the ‘wrong’ mood to properly interpret what we say. There are numerous reasons why the exchange may not be as crystal clear as we imagine.

That is where it is important to get feedback in some form or other.

Having ‘transmitted’ a message we need to know that it has been received; that it was complete when received; that the receiver could process it; what the receiver’s reaction to it was. A whole host of things associated with “learning” how effective the communication was. A lack of feedback on these things means that it rapidly becomes very difficult to communicate effectively.

There is only so long that a one sided communication can continue to be relevant, since the transmitter’s “situation awareness” rapidly gets out of date – their local model only gets updated by suppositions, guesses and randomness. That results in an increased likelihood that the communication will do more harm than good – and it tends towards the certainty that any “good” that does come from it will be purely down to chance.

There are some exceptions to this – but for the most part it will require a large degree of good fortune – not to mention limitless perseverance – to attain any useful result. There are, I guess, situations where this is almost accepted as being “part of the job” – I could imagine that those responsible for dealing with people who are suffering from PTSD will almost every time find that there is resistance to giving ‘relevant’ feedback.

Note that the ‘relevant’ part of this is important – there may be plenty of feedback – just that it doesn’t inform anyone about the important aspects of the situation. The PTSD sufferer will talk endlessly about unrelated parts of their life – but will ignore/suppress/avoid the causes of their problems.

Its interesting (to me at least!!) that this entry in my blog has taken off at a bit of a tangent – initially I was talking about how communication failed because of “misunderstandings” which are down to the language used. Latterly – in exploring issues surrounding communication ‘problems’ – I have veered off to situations where only one party is communicating – some sort of monologue I guess. In truth these are not so very different. – the first case often being a sort of merging of two simultaneous (and opposing) instances of the second case – two parties talking (in monologue fashion) whilst ‘pretending’ to be in dialogue.

This is now long enough, however the theme will no doubt be revisited as it would seem that I haven’t yet reached the end of the story.

Two related incidents over the last few days have – once again – driven home both the sentiment and the reality of this.

I found myself wandering round the university town of Oxford and – as part of that wander – we went into Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street.  Opened on 1st January 1879 from the outside it looks like just another little shop – however – in common with seemingly a large number of buildings in the centre of Oxford it goes both up and down from street level.

This results in a sort of TARDIS-like effect when the only appropriate response is “its bigger on the inside”!  If you are interested there is an exceedingly comprehensive online tour of the shop here.

Anyone reading what I write here cannot help but realise that various areas associated with cognition are very much of interest to me.  Philosophy, Psychology, the Mind and other associated subjects are areas of any book store that draw my attention.  This resulted in me heading for the very bottom of the Norrington Room – the bottom of the shop – where I perused a number of books that caught my eye.

Given the subject matter – I was immediately struck by the philosophical question raised by the fact that there were four shelves which contained copies of the recommended book of the week (or perhaps month, can’t remember) plus the 1st, 2nd and 3rd highest selling books in the subject area.  What struck me as apt was not that the shelves existed, but that they seemed (rather incongruously) to have sold out of the 3rd best seller!!

Couldn’t help wondering if it would become No.1 next week (and if so, would it still be an empty shelf?).  So many questions…..

Anyway – getting back to the point – having realised that I had read just a few of the books that filled the shelves around that part of the bookshop I was (to quote Pratchett once more) “struck by my tremendous sense of my own ignorance” – there was so much still to read – and – wait a minute – what about the thousands of books that I had walked past in order to get to this part of the bookshop – how few have I actually read.

It reminded me a bit of seeing the “hundred must read books” on a website.  If I remember correctly I had read less than half – but more than the ‘average’.  However, whilst I have a reasonable record when it comes to having read the “classics” I realise that in comparison to the huge number of books in that bookshop my “read” list is tiny – therefore my ignorance is huge!!

The other reminder of my ignorance was on a completely different topic – the incidence of mental health issues amongst the population.  I was surprised to read that 1 in 100 people suffer from schizophrenia – then, on researching the validity of that statistic I was gobsmacked to discover that around 23% of the population of the UK will suffer some form of mental illness in their lifetime.

Wow!!!

No wonder there are so many references to these insidious diseases now that the taboo on talking openly about them seems to have dissipated quite a lot.

So – I am reminded once more – well twice more – just how great my ignorance is – and I know that every morsel of knowledge that I consume will result in another huge lump of ignorance being added to the pile.  By some measures “knowledge” is multiplying orders of magnitude faster than i was just a few years ago.  There is no way that anyone can possibly keep up – and so – the ignorance mountain will continue to rise up far faster than the knowledge mole-hill.

All I can do is concentrate on ensuring that the mole-hill doesn’t collapse in on itself!!

There are basically – as you might expect – two pretty much opposing camps.  On the one side you have those who are frustrated by ‘meandering’ discussions and who want a more focussed product – effectively filtering out anything that is “off-topic”.  On the other side (and strangely these seem to be the minority) are those who are defending the “status quo” on the grounds that – basically – it works for them.  I say strangely because my experience of the discussions is that the majority of contributors are happy to wander off topic….

I’m in both camps – yes, I know that sounds a bit strange – but I think that both sides have a point – where they are (in my humble opinion) wrong is assuming that their point excludes the other!!  (which is in itself a bit of an anomaly given the nature of the group involved)

When someone asks a question in LinkedIn it would seem only polite to answer it – however, in many cases the reason for asking the question is that no one actually knows the answer – so discussion ensues – many points of view are expressed – occasionally a conclusion is reached – often things wander off into related subjects – then several conversations occur interleaved in a single discussion.

So – that is the reality of what happens.  Why is it a problem?  Many reasons but first and foremost there is rarely any “pulling together” of a consensus so each individual following the thread is left to draw their own conclusions – but, hold on – is that actually a problem.  We are dealing here with a group of people who are capable of “thinking for themselves” and who, in many instances, have well thought through and coherent worldviews.  Surely they are each capable of working things out for themselves.

Yes – for those involved – but what about capturing the “collected wisdom” for others not fortunate enough to have been there – the phrase “you had to be there” becomes literally true.  Yes you can wade through hundreds of posts – but where do you start – which discussions are worth persevering with – which are not.

Whoa!!!  Isn’t this simply a reflection of “real life” – assuming we can take the world of LinkedIn as something other than real life.  As a learner – what do I read; where do I begin to learn about any given subject; how can I filter out the ‘dross’ and get the ‘nuggets’ of information that matter TO ME.  Those last two words are important.

Ultimately the only person who can decide what I need to learn is me.  No matter how good a job someone else (or some other piece of technology) does is going to be ‘right’ for me.  If someone buys me a book as a Christmas present it may, or may not be interesting – but they cannot know a priori which.

Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t want to stop people buying me books or telling me “interesting facts” or pointing me at a journal article or blog that I MUST READ.  I have written elsewhere on the essential nature of serendipitous learning for me.  Where such ‘directing’ is wrong (again in my humble opinion) is not in telling me what to read, but in stopping me from reading something else.

Any ‘summary’ of a LinkedIn discussion must, inevitably, leave something out – what gets left out – that is a matter of ‘personal’ opinion – what is ‘irrelevant’ – that is a matter of ‘personal’ opinion (especially as something which is entirely irrelevant to ONE particular thread my be just the missing piece of an entirely different jigsaw) and so some possible links to good (and potentially novel) stuff is lost.

In the old days (!!!) your knowledge was what you could hold in your head – if your memory failed, then your knowledge was diminished.  The ‘only’ supplementary to this was in the form of books (knowing where to look)  whether owned or in a library – where you were subject to whatever structure someone else had deemed ‘appropriate’ – or personal notebooks (of whatever form) that allowed freedom to choose what was included/excluded but quickly became extremely difficult to access in any sort of efficient way.

Now – in the age of the internet; wikipedia; blogs; databases and an explosion of ‘data’ we are so much better off!!! (OK there is just a little bit of sarcasm in that!)

What we do have is the tools available to structure our own “external” knowledge in a way that is better than the personal notebooks – but lack the skills and experience to use those tools in the most effective way – why – simply because they are all “new” and (perhaps worse) every day along comes the “all singing all dancing – well nearly – even better new way” and we have to re-appraise our ideas.

For most people I suspect that is just too much effort!

I admire those who have built up impressive online repositories of information.  Some examples:

Calresco

Principia Cybernetica

Mitre’s Enterprise Architecture Body of Knowledge

ISSS Primer

Papers on Consciousness

Basic Philosophy

David Alman’s knowledge page

Atlassian

(Note that this is far from a complete list – rather it is a representative selection of different ways of approaching this problem.  They range from sites recording a ‘personal’ knowledge base to those collecting a reference list)

Even the least sophisticated of these are so much better than what “we had before”.  Any criticism of them comes as a result of realising that they are products of their time and technology changes so fast that there is always a “better way”.  In this blog – and its associated photo album and reference library and (an essentially empty) wiki – I am starting to grow my own repository.  It will, no doubt, grow even more strands over time – there are already some things that I would love to incorporate.

However, I recognise that – fundamentally – it is a tool for ME – not for anyone else.  Yes, hopefully others may stumble over something that is helpful – or points them in the right direction, but is it possible to design in such serendipity?

In a previous note I wrote:

I’m quite pleased that over five years later I still agree with myself!!!

Our way forward is by making connections – observing new relationships – tying together loose ends.  I see little value in merely repeating ‘accepted wisdom’ – here the social network phenomenon of “sharing” is getting it partly right because each “share” creates a new link that someone might be able to follow – like the birds adding extra breadcrumbs to Hansel and Gretel’s trail rather than eating them – reinforcing the pathway.

We should all strive to create links of all types – and I am not just talking about hyperlinks on web pages.  Its the people as well – and here LinkedIn has undoubtedly helped me – drawing together like-minded folks with whom I find that I can connect well – no longer limited to those that I “meet” in real life – limited as that is by geography.  There is, of course, no guarantee that the “right people” will meet – however some of the barriers have been broken down.  Certainly from personal experience I would never have collected such a diverse and wonderful group of friends/colleagues/acquaintances without the power of “social networking” online.  (that is a whole new topic)

Another “whole new topic” is providing tools to enable really efficient searching – but in a serendipitous way, when the person doing the searching doesn’t know what they are looking for.  Perhaps I’ll come back to that one another time.

I would finish this blog with a caution – this has been all about the positive – make connections – enable relationships to bear fruit – and so on.  It is always easy to fall in to the trap of only stating the “do this” requirement and ignoring the “don’t do this” requirements.  In this context we must try hard to avoid erecting barriers (note this is quite different to breaking down existing barriers) by using  our power of “make connections” to drive thing in a particular direction.

Serendipity needs choice – serendipity needs the ability to arrive at the same conclusion from different directions – and the ability to explore new alternatives – serendipity does not need “do not go here” barriers or “this is not correct” barriers or even “here be dragons” – unless of course the warning is meant as an invitation – much like “don’t press this button”!!

One of my particular interests is in the way people learn – and conversely the way to ‘teach’ them to help them in their learning.  I found myself this week in precisely the sort of dilemma that I am considering here within the teaching context.

A little background context – I was tasked with overseeing the work of someone new to a particular software tool.  The person is very bright, but this is largely outside his area of expertise and, additionally, he is not someone that I know well enough to understand his “mental models”.

I therefore had to strike some balance between telling him to go away and get on with it – thereby giving him no guidance whatsoever –  and explaining everything step by step leaving no room for any creativity at all.  Clearly it is very rare to be in a situation where you are at either end of this spectrum and I knew without thinking too hard that was the situation here.

I needed to give him sufficient guidance to let him go away and use his undoubted brain power to solve the problem, without giving him so much that it felt that I was “teaching granny to suck eggs”.

In these sorts of situations it is not uncommon to explain something to someone and, at the end of the explanation, say “do you understand that?” and almost always the answer will be “yes” regardless of the real level of understanding.  The “yes” answer can actually be wrong on all sorts of levels – it may be that the learner thinks he understands it, but when he goes away and tries to put it into practice it is a complete disaster; it may be that the learner is too intimidated by the teacher to risk a “no” answer; it may be that the leaner does understand everything he was told – but that the teacher has missed some crucial points; and many more.

Fundamentally, the teaching/learning process must connect in such a way that all barriers between he participants are broken down – it is more important (in my world!!!) that the relationship has developed to a point whereby the learner s comfortable to admit to whatever difficulties he has with the subject than to actually pass the right knowledge!!

Is that a surprising statement?

Of course it would be great if all teaching passed on perfect knowledge – I doubt that is achievable.  So, the teacher/learner relationship must become strong enough that the learner does not have any problem with asking questions for clarification.  Don’t forget that these questions are, implicitly, criticising the teacher for not having taught perfectly in the first place, so the learner as well as the teacher is in a place full of dilemmas.  Hence the need for a good relationship to take precedence over completeness of teaching.

We do face similar dilemmas in almost all relationships – there is a need to behave in such a way that the other person in the relationship responds ‘correctly’ – success in this is why the great musical ensembles work so well; it is why people who have known each other for a long time often seem to have some sort of telepathic link; it is why husbands and wives know the best way to deal with each other; it is why the truly great teachers inspire their students.

I remember teachers – good and bad – and the best ones were those who made some sort of connection with you – there were some that I admired for their knowledge and intelligence, but they were not good at passing it on because they tended to treat everyone as thought they were at the same level as they themselves were and were probably very disappointed to find that few matched that.

In all relationships I believe it is important to try to understand the range of possibilities for the other person’s behaviours/reactions.  It is very easy to criticise because the other person does not “meet our expectations” but often the problem is actually the expectations.  This is something which I have been guilty of in the past – where I have allowed relationships to suffer because the other person was not acting ‘correctly’ with respect to my worldview.

Now, I try always to act with respect for the worldview that I think they have!  Note that this can be troublesome as well, for this is still my worldview we are talking about and this part of my worldview must necessarily be more error prone.  We have all been through the thinking process that goes “what if he/she knows”; “what if he/she knows that I know?”; what if he/she knows that I know that she knows”; and so on ad infinitum.  This is precisely the sort of thing that we must – almost unconsciously – go through in order to relate to other people in every situation.  Its just that some situations are more ‘important’ than others.

When talking previously about friends and “how close” they were we suggested that one of the paradoxes was that it was more difficult to deal with close friends on this sort of level because the closer they got to you the more they became individuals rather than a crowd.  Here we see that (at least part of) what causes this is that the mental models of individuals differ significantly, whereas the mental model of a crowd is (relatively speaking) more predictable.

If you think of your youth (regardless of how far away that might be) and when you were trying to impress a potential girlfriend/boyfriend it is much easier to interact with girls or boys as a group than it is to tailor the interaction to a single individual.

Similarly, there are huge fortunes made from the advertising ‘business’ – but that only works on crowds – very little is successful on an individual level – unless it is particularly tailored to the individual himself.

So, to sum this up – it is hugely important to understand that people have a complex set of mental models through which they make sense of the world and make decisions on how to behave/react.  In order to properly connect with people, it is necessary to fit in with those models.  As they say “know your audience”.

Of course, in keeping with the overall theme of the blog I should stress that this is work in progress and “feeding my ignorance” remains the main aim – trying to identify the context for this is important, but it does not mean that the context is fixed.  As my learning increases, so the context may shift.

Note that although this entry is published it is not – and never can be – complete.  Therefore (in keeping with my worldview itself) I reserve the right to update and change it!!   Understanding such self-referential things is part of the way I believe we need to view things.

Simply put, I believe that we all create for ourselves an internal representation of “the way the real world is” in order for us to make sense of and interact with that real world.  For me, that internal representation stresses the inter-relatedness of things and, particularly, the way those relationships change over time.

There – that’s done it.

Well OK perhaps it does need a bit more……

Firstly, it might have been better to entitle the post mein weltanschauungen simply because although my worldview could be considered complete and a single whole, it is more understandable to look at it as a number of (not necessarily consistent) mental models that interact to allow me to make sense of things.

There are two concepts that, I guess, dominate any description of my worldview and they are systems and models.  It is probably no coincidence that these are both terms that have a multitude of meanings.  Neither word is really sufficient to capture what is properly meant and therefore it becomes even more necessary that I try to explain the way in which I use them.

Systems exist in order to achieve some purpose.  Many people get a bit hung up about the word system; many people have trouble understanding the nuances of meaning that I apply to the word.  Within the last few weeks I have taken part in a discussion about whether the ‘concept’ of system is actually needed.  I have to say that whilst I can accept that the word might get in the way very often, I find it difficult to imagine life without the concept that I currently label “a system”.

I do think that systems are imaginary.  That is to say that they only exist because someone labels them as a system.

The idea of imaginary systems also can cause some people a problem – they point at something and say “that isn’t imaginary” and they are right, however it doesn’t matter how real the physical bits are the notion that it is a system is a product of someone’s imagination and that is always going to be predicated on their mental models.

So, systems are imaginary in “my world” – they are also fleeting in the sense that they do not exist forever – in some case they exist for quite a long time, but in others they come into existence for just a few moments.  In addition, they are forever changing and what comprises a system will (in most cases) be constantly in a state of flux – including what is inside and what is outside the system boundary.

Here we meet another of my ideas that some people find difficult.  There is a need to draw a boundary round the system – that I do not disagree with – but where my thinking differs is that for me the boundary is fluid not fixed.  The ‘system of interest’ will expand and contract depending on many factors as it moves through its own particular life cycle.  For many people drawing the boundary means something very rigid and everything is either inside or outside the system.  In contrast, I am comfortable with the notion that things “swap sides” through time.

Enough on systems for the moment.

Models are abstractions created to represent parts of ‘reality’ in a format that we can understand.  Necessarily every model is less than perfect – if it was a perfect representation then it would be the reality and therefore superfluous.  We all create and use models all the time – when was the last time you looked at a map – that is one of the many every day models that we create and use.

Much of the time we are unaware that we are using a model, but it is my belief that all of our interaction with the world around us is based on the way in which we have modelled that world inside our heads – what I (and many others) call our mental models.  These house all our preconceived ideas, all our biases, all our prejudices and preferences and they drive our behaviour.

We each have a tendency to project our models on to the behaviours of others – often with the result that we find it very difficult to understand those behaviours.  If we work on the basis that everyone sees the world the same way as we do, then of course we will be disoriented by behaviours that contradict that model.

For some people “a model” is a computer simulation – that’s it – for others, of course, a model is a pretty girl on a catwalk – for yet others it is a number of bits of plastic that need to be glued together and painted to represent some famous aircraft/ship/car/whatever.  It is no surprise that the combination of the concept of systems and the concept of models – both of which have a myriad of meanings – results in considerable care being needed when explaining my worldview.

For me, I view the world through a set of mental models that determine how I will react and those mental models see the world in a systemic way.  I prefer the concept of multiple mental models because to me it makes more sense to have a number of individually coherent models that can contradict one another than having one model that is in itself inconsistent. (I guess that is itself one of my mental models  )

I think that I act in a way that is consistent with all of these models at all times – sometimes I will come across situations that are not covered by my suite of models – then I need to expand them or create a new one specific to the situation.  At other times I come across a situation where my models are contradictory – again, this results in change/expansion to the models in order to remove the contradiction.  How all contradictions are removed however.  There are some ways in which I view the world that can be seen to be incompatible if I were ever to attempt to justify them.

So with that basis we can start to examine some aspects of my worldview – bearing in mind at all times that it is predicated on a very basic mental model that although I will defend my view of the world I am also aware that it is certainly incomplete and wrong – as all models are.  I also go along (to a certain extent) with Mark Twain when he says:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

I qualified that with “to a certain extent” because I am also fond of suggesting that they thing that causes most projects to fail or plans to go awry is something that you didn’t think of before the event.  That is sort of covered in the Mark Twain quote because if you avoid thinking that you “know for sure” that you have ‘thought of everything’ and instead consider it a certainty that you have forgotten ‘something’ then you can make contingency plans for that ‘something’ even if you have no idea what it actually is.

The fact that everyone views the world in different ways is – for me – an inescapable and palpably obvious fact.  Where, I think, this causes the most difficulty is when we are blind to the (equally obvious to me) fact that  these differences do not make one right and the other wrong – instead they are ‘just’ differences.  The judgement of what is right and what is wrong in this sense may even be unable to be made since the nature of much of our mental models is that they are not necessarily objective.

The rejection of an either/or stance in favour of a both/and one is part of my way of dealing with the world.  This means that I am tolerant of other views even if I do not agree with them, but it most cetainly does not mean that I believe that there is never a right and wrong position.  It would be easy to equate my tolerance with an ‘anything goes’ attitude – that is certainly not the case and I will (at times vigorously) defend my own point of view.  Is there anything that is always right or anything that is always wrong?  Well I guess it depends on how specific you make the ‘anything’ – even the greatest evils and the most beneficient acts have a (perhaps very small) doubt about whether they were right or wrong and often we must ask the question “who are we to judge”.

Equally, there are some things which are, quite literally, impossible to call – where two (or more) interpretations of the situations can be quite different but still correct (or wrong – although this doesn’t really count as there are an infinite number of wrong interpretations).

Our mental models therefore incorporate and express all of our biases and prejudices and they are the result of a huge array of factors including all of our experiences to date through our lives.  Of course the fact that we are now exposed to so much more information about the world than used to be the case means that we have both the opportunity to better refine these models and the risk of greatly misinterpreting the signs.

There are huge areas of subject matter about which I know nothing (or next to nothing – so little that I would not begin to understand it) and – of course, there are even bigger areas that I don’t even know that I know nothing about.

That is not a problem for me – I am comfortable with the fact that no matter how hard I try there is too much in this world for me to know everything.

I do see, virtually every day, many, many instances of people who are unwilling to let go of their own mental models.  In some cases, let me stress, this can be a good thing.  However, very often (and it has to be said this is becoming ever more prevalent by news presenters when they do ‘interviews’) there is no attempt at dialogue to explore the limitations of knowledge, instead there is a berating of one party by the other, with both being ultra-defensive.

There is a paradox here as well – when I see/hear someone propounding a point of view or an idea or whatever that doesn’t fit with my own mental model I often think “why can’t they go and learn a bit more’.  Why can’t I?  Who would benefit most?  Are they ‘lacking’ some extra knowledge that I have?  Or have I got some ‘incorrect’ knowledge that they have not been exposed to?  My mental model makes me think that it might just possibly be me that is wrong.  Why should I be the most knowledgeable?

It is said “in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king”.  Unfortunately I think that too often we mistake a little knowledge for true wisdom.  The greatly increased availability of ‘stuff’ through the medium of the www results in just about everyone having a misplaced sense of ‘knowing’ things about which, in reality, they have no more than a nodding acquaintance!!  Watching news bulletins quickly shows that “the man in the street” has a valid (!!!) opinion on absolutely every subject.  The reality is often far from that….

If asked to rate my knowledge about some subject on a scale from none to ‘guru’ I don’t ever give myself “top marks”.  I have learned that there is always more to learn.  It seems to me (and don’t forget this is itself filtered through my mental models) that too manypeople are rating themselves too highly on the knowledge scale.

So, according to my weltanschauung one area where we are failing is in putting too much credence on what we know and therefore paying too little attention to what we don’t know.  A second failing is that we tend to fail to take into account change.

It is a well proven that the vast majority of car drivers consider themselves to be “better than average” drivers.   Now, I know you can prove just about anything with statistics, but this is one which patently must be wrong.  However, we all fail in these sort of self-judgement tests and I must be careful whenever I suggest that I am in any way special.

It does seem to me though that there are ‘abilities’ and ‘skills’ that I have that are not shared with the majority of the population.  This is not elitist in any way, because it is a statement that can be made about anyone.  So, when I say things like “unlike most people…” I feel that this is a not unreasonable statement to make about just about anything – it doesn’t make me better – only different.

The fact that I take a very systemic view of the world is one way in which I am (I think) very much in the minority.  Is a systemic view the ‘right’ view?  I don’t know, but, given that it is what works for me I would have to answer that I believe that it is a better way of understanding the world.  I talked about systems earlier – what exactly do I think distiguishes a ‘systemic view’.

Primarily the distinguishing features are a concentration on the interactions and a very strong emphasis on the fact that things do not stand still – change happens – and that change not only changes the world, but it changes me (and my mental models) as well.

There is no doubt that the way I act and react in the world today is very different to the way I did as a teenager or as a child.  There are things that I thought or did then that I would not consider thinking or doing now – and vice versa of course.  Sometimes change has come suddenly and there is a specific trigger that “changed my mind” – in other cases it is difficult to point to the moment in time when the mind changing happened, but it is clear that comparison between ‘then’ and ‘now’ exhibits significant differences.

I think that for many people cause and effect are inextricably closely coupled – I, on the other hand, most certainly see cause and effect as separated in time and space.  Often, indeed, it is only through reflection that the causes can be determined – and even then you must be careful not to use ‘post-hoc’ vision to create a false interpretation.

Another aspect of my systemic viewpoint is that the interaction between competing and cooperating systems is important.  I adopt different roles at different times – as does just about everyone else – I am a parent; I am an employee; I am a teacher; I am a musician; I am an athlete; and so on.  Apart from these being different roles they exist wihin different ‘worlds’ – my family world; my work world; my church world; and so on.

The worlds (and the roles) can and do overlap to a certain extent but fundamentally they are linked only by whatever I am.  To a certain extent my persona is different in each of these worlds, but they are all me – inextricably linked – and even though there are aspects of me that do not surface in each of the worlds – and I suspect some aspects that are private to my internal world – the complex relationships between them are driving my behaviour and how others perceive me.

My worldview must therefore assume that the same is true for others and that those parts of them I connect with within the worlds that I inhabit are only part of their own complex characters – I must never assume that I know everything about them.

This has been a long discourse, but I think a necessary one, since it allows me to discuss rather more isolated facets with the advantage of having given this context.  In keeping with my worldview, you should not assume that this covers everything!  It does, however, lay out the ground rules for interpreting other aspects.